"How Disney Tore Down The Owl House" Transcript

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[On Screen]: "Disclaimer: I had strep throat while filming this video."

The bulk of content on this channel is about queer representation. And because, as I have mentioned numerous times, the Walt Disney Corporation is playing a ruthless, cutthroat game of being the world's number one producer of media in general, my ire is naturally drawn to... that.

Believe it or not, I'd really like to not talk about Disney so often. I'd love to make more videos about representation that doesn't suck. I would like to be able to celebrate what we could have and do have. Instead, I spend most of the time explaining how it's okay to ask for more than the flaky lean-in queerness that we've all been gaslit into praising.

But the problem with a dwindling number of large studios capable of juggling the kind of budgets you need for multimedia productions, is that there are too few cooks in the kitchen. Fewer cooks means the menu gets slashed and we don't have anyone else to go to if we don't like what we're being served. So we end up groveling at the feet of these studio executives and believe them when they say they're doing the best that they can. And then putting them on these pedestals when they roll out the bare minimum.

If we weren't living in such a monopolistic world we wouldn't have to talk about Disney. We could just let the free market do its thing and give other studios a chance to corner the market on all ages queer content, queer inclusive blockbusters, queer characters and genre films, or even lighthearted adult-oriented queer content that isn't about a reductionalist display of pathos and suffering as the sole defining element of queer validity.

But in spite of Disney's obsession with kowtowing to its own brand like that's the anthill that it's going to die on, there are a few times they have given the gays everything they want. And while I was making content about Disney's shortcomings on representation, I was informed that The Owl House, the 2020 animated series on the Disney Channel, absolved Disney of all the queerbaiting and queerphobia that I was accusing them of. And even when I wasn't talking about Disney at all, I was reminded of The Owl House over and over and over and over--

And so I watched it. [party noisemaker sound] Go me I guess! I really wasn't ever expecting to hate it, I just wasn't watching it because I'm an only child, which means when someone tells me to do something I don't do it just because I don't like being told what to do. I was probably going to end up watching it in the end eventually. Probably would have waited for a third season, so I could properly binge it. But Disney decided to be a big old dick and soft cancel the show by cutting the final season down from the ninteen to twenty-one episodes... to three.

And this cancellation came in spite of the show's growing fanbase and increasing word of mouth popularity. The only reason I know about the existence of The Owl House is due entirely to people talking about it. Not a single Disney-sponsored ad. And there isn't much that manages to slip past me on social media these days.

So Disney managed to produce media which was openly queer, kid-friendly, adult accessible, and which the gays didn't really have a problem with, and didn't really stir up much of a controversy from queer opposition. Which seems to be exactly the kind of kickback they're hoping to accomplish every time they throw a buriable lesbian into a Pixar movie or a sassy gay-coded sidekick into a live action remake. And every time they try that, they basically project headlines to the moon to let everyone know about it. And every time we come away feeling unseen. And every time they promised next time is when they're actually going to give us the real first queer character. All the while, leaks out of Pixar indicate that all that queercoding we've been reading into, were actually once intended to be a part of the picture. And yet the mouse... left it on the cutting room floor.

Yet when they got exactly what they seemed to be looking for with The Owl House, they tore it down. So, time to conduct a psychological assessment on a corporation to attempt to figure out what could possibly be going on in there.

The Owl House was approved for a second season in 2019, before it even premiered. This kind of two-season safety net no doubt helped contribute to the writers' confidence in brazenly depicting queer identities and media directed toward a juvenile audience. And even though Season One only really served up some gay dads, background gay prom dates, and strong overtones of lesbian panic, that must have been a bit too queer for Disney. I say only because it really is the least a piece of media can do to represent us. But it's still leagues above what most media offers. Should we be grateful for getting offered a sip of water after a week in the desert? Hmm.

So what's going on in The Owl House? Well, the titular residence itself is a sentient building which is (or is not) controlled by Hooty.

Who is a sentient door, doorbell, doorman, door knocker, security system, and best friend. The primary resident, Eda, is an incredibly powerful witch, swindler and all-around miscreant who is wanted by the law because she refuses to conform to an arbitrary standard of rules and guidelines. She lives with a strange adorable dog demon, first name King, last name Of Demons. He may be a pet, or a roommate, or an adopted child. Eda makes her living off-the-grid, by using an interdimensional portal to snag garbage from the human world to pawn off to magical residents of the Boiling Isles as novelties. And one day a piece of garbage named Luz wanders through.

(Luz is a people. Not garbage. That-- that was a joke. People aren't garbage. Most people aren't garbage.)

Luz is a girl who has her head, if it's not in the clouds, it's somewhere else. She's a little bit "not like the other girls", to the point where her mother decides she needs to be shipped off to a special secluded summer camp that will teach her how to be "normal." It's not analogous for a certain kind of therapy camp at all, I swear.

Instead, she chases Eda's staff owl through a briefcase portal into the Boiling Isle. A magical place. A horrible place. Creator Dana Terrace's direct inspiration was Narnia imagined by Hieronymus Bosch. The whole of the Isles are the corpse of a long dead Titan. Because the Titan was magical, all life evolved on the islands to use this magic. And it's mostly unpleasant.

Luz decides she would rather stay here and learn to be a witch from Eda, instead of going back home where she would have to be in a summer camp where she'd be shoved into a neatly labeled box which would deterministically establish how she can contribute to normal society. And if Luz is gonna get labeled, she's gonna put that label on herself, damnit.

Humans do not typically live on the Boiling Isles, however. And though the residents know of humans, and though the sum of human monsters and myths come from the Boiling Isles, there is quite a hubbub about a human living there.

All things on the Boiling Isles can use magic to an extent, but as humans have not evolved here, they lack the physiological organs needed to use it. Luz however manages to figure out a way to make magic out of glyphs and joins a magic school, much to the dismay of Eda, who loathes conformity.

There are some very clear parallels between Eda and Luz, and the Boiling Isles can be seen as a microcosm of our social culture of conformity. All witches, by mandate, must join a coven, and when they join a coven, they are branded and their access to magic is limited to only the single type of magic the coven represents. Eda refuses to limit her potential, priding herself on being the strongest witch on the Isles, and she looks down on the witches who conformed these covens. They, Eda claims, are choosing to limit their own potential for the sole purpose of keeping up social conventions. Chaotic pansexual energy for the win. And there are punishments, social and legislative, for nonconformity, especially for those who refuse to relegate themselves to only one label of identity, I mean magic.

The real plot of the series revolves around the topic of expression and identity. The primary villain of the series enforces this coven hegemony strictly and with an iron fist, Emperor Belos. The only coven which is permitted to practice all forms of magic is the Emperor's Coven, where he recruits witches whose unbridled talent he needs to enforce his will, but who he can still control with promises of his favor. Eda represents the most dangerous threat to his totalitarian rule, an exceptional witch who does not need him to be as powerful as she is. Nonconformity is tolerable to authority when insignificant, but those who are exceptional can challenge authoritarian rhetoric.

While Emperor Belos's plots and centuries-old schemes are the underlying narrative of the show, the bulk of each episode features Luz's going on magical coming-of-age adventures, frequently featuring her friends Willow and Gus, and then later Amity, who was once a rival and later a girlfriend. With an actual animated gay kiss towards the end of the second season, yes, but there is a great deal of hand-holding and cheek smooching leading up to that. True to form, these girls who like girls spend a great deal of time doubting whether the girl who is displaying obvious signs of affection actually likes them. And after they started dating, both Luz and Amity vocalized the word "girlfriend" about once each episode which, while gratuitous, is a great way to remind the audience that they are in fact girlfriends. Because in spite of the blushing, the dancing, the hand-holding, the gay panic, there was a contingent of the audience that still felt that the pairing came out of nowhere.

And even though the show chooses to depict queerness textually, it also goes out of its way to continue including subtextual queerness too. To me, this is clear in the character designs themselves. Look closely and you may spot a number of LGBTQ flags in the show. Not being flown from flagpoles, or hung up in the windows however. Luz's primary design seems to sample colors from the asexual flag which alternately may be sampling from the demisexual colors. However, with the addition of her cloak, she wears bisexual colors. Eda's sister Lilith vaguely resembles the asexual flag, at least in Season One, however, she was also described as aroace by people working on the show.Looking at King, I always felt that his eye colors were a weird choice. There could have been lots of ways to make his eyes pop, but this seemed weirdly specific. If we're following this pattern of flag colors though, his eyes themselves resemble the intersex flag, or his color scheme as a whole matches the nonbinary flag. And furthermore, Amity's hair color change bears a resemblance to the genderqueer flag.

This may be a bit of a stretch given that there is a they/them character on the show, Eda's ex Raine, whom all characters automatically default to their chosen pronouns. The flag colors are likely nothing more than a nod that contributes to the overlying queerness of the show as a whole. Maybe on a dare someone told Dana that they can't possibly use the queer flags as a color palette for an entire animated series. Because even if they aren't strictly written as queer the show does tend to lean on queer flags for palettes. For instance, Eda's color palette seems to be sampled from the lesbian flag. She's not a lesbian herself - she references a train of ex-boyfriends - but I bet if you asked her how she identified she'd just say:

I mean she does kind of have these rogue queer aunt vibes, right? The kind who's late to family functions, who's the subject of family gossip, who somehow always manages to land on her feet, and who hides things in her hair. The kind who you feel safe asking if she can hook you up with a fake ID, and will not only deliver, but take you to your first bar. Some of us are lucky enough to know her.

So yes, The Owl House is very unafraid to brazenly depict queerness while at the same time leaning on queercoding and unspoken queerness to indicate that the Boiling Isles are much more lenient when it comes to sexual and gender identities. This is a world, after all, where people belong to various categories of demons, some of whom do not appear to have any gender traits. In a world where there are sentient tentacle monsters, chest-faced centaurs and Tinella Nosa, it would make sense that getting upset about pronouns wouldn't have a place in common discourse.

However, what helps The Owl House rise above being just a cartoon about queer people, is that it also offers additional commentary about a queer state of affairs. How Luz escapes from one system of oppression, and learns that this world of magical freedom has a system of oppression all its own. And for this, The Owl House takes an increasingly anti-establishment stance, which is not directed at singular jerks but rather discusses root causes of societal oppression as a whole.

But is this anti-establishment sentiment why Disney, a massive corporation with weird internal rules and cultural standards, canceled the show? Likely not, because "just be yourself" has been the media mantra of Disney since the Renaissance in the 90s. So if The Owl House has broad strokes messaging that matches the Disney brand, and if it has animation and design that matches the Disney brand, and if it has an array of characters and presented themes about family values that match the Disney brand, and if aside from that the show boasts stellar ratings and prestige which very much cements the Disney brand as presenting excellence in children's media, then why on earth did they cancel it? Who knows why, who could ever know? ...We know.

Generally, Disney Channel animated shows tend to run for fewer seasons when compared to their network counterparts. Look at Adventure Time and Steven Universe, which clocked in at 283 and 160 episodes respectively, and compare them to popular Disney channel shows like Gravity Falls (41 episodes) and Star vs. The Forces of Evil (77 episodes).

Once upon a time Disney even had the 65 episode rule where no animated show on the Disney Channel could go past 65 episodes. It's an outdated business practice that Disney clung onto a lot longer than most producers. With 65 episodes, one episode could be broadcast each weekday, reaching the 65th episode at the end of the 13th week. Thirteen weeks is one quarter of a year. Four 65 episode shows can be broadcast in a single calendar year in the same time slot. It took shows like Gargoyles and DuckTales to end that trend.

But that doesn't mean Disney doesn't use bullcrap reasons to cancel shows today. Terrace has previously offered some insight into why The Owl House wasn't renewed for a full third season, which boiled down to a frustratingly simple reason that had nothing to do with reviews (all good) or viewership (also good): Someone decided that the show didn't fit Disney's brand.

Don't worry Dana, I'll assume the bad faith for you.

So it was one guy's tastes, one guy. One guy, who could be that one guy, who could that one guy be? Though not officially confirmed, I'm willing to bet it's this guy, Bob Chapek, the current CEO of the Walt Disney Company. Who earlier this year made a name for himself by not speaking out about Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill until it was too late to do anything about it, and was infamously forcing Disney and Pixar filmmakers to cut queer content from their films.

Chapek made his name in the company by running the Disney parks. Many feel he ran them into the ground. Disenchantment with the parks from diehard Disney lovers has been at an all-time high ever since he got control of the parks, let alone the company. Massive price increases in everything from food to ticket prices to accommodations have made a Disney vacation more difficult to afford than ever, to the point where a suite at the Disneyland Hotel costs more than staying at the Palace of Versailles in France. At the same time, the company has eliminated perks like the formerly free Magical Express transportation to and from Walt Disney World from the Orlando airport. Genie Plus has made stand-by lines regularly exceed an hour for rides that used to average 15 minutes.

Even Bob Iger, the former Disney CEO and the man who hand-picked Chapek, has had regrets. Several Disney sources and people who are "familiar with Iger's thinking" have indicated that Iger has spent the time since announcing Chapek as his successor regretting what he has called, "one of his worst business decisions."

According to a former Disney executive, Iger has said that he didn't realize Chapek was "such a 'novice'" when it came to handling complex issues like talent management and political battles, and that Chapek was arrogant and uninterested in other people's opinions.

He's also not fond of the fact that Chapek is a crypto enthusiast who wants NFTs to become particularly important parts of Disney going forward. He's even started consulting with Warner Brothers on how to rebuild the DC EU. That's how much he wants Chapek to fail.

Chapek has also come under harsh criticism for treatment of cast members (that's what Disney calls park employees). Many full-time park employees struggle to provide food and basic necessities for their families. Earlier this year, Abigail Disney, grandniece of Walt Disney and granddaughter of company co-founder Roy Disney, released a documentary about the Walt Disney Company's obligation to do better for its employees. Which you'd think would have got on Chapek's nerves, but, at least in public, he seemed unfazed.

Profit has been his main defense. He took over as CEO of the company on February 25th, 2020, as the pandemic was just starting to be taken seriously as a significant global concern. Less than a month later, he took the unprecedented step of closing all Disney theme parks around the world. In Florida, the shutdown lasted from March to July of 2020. In California, it lasted for 13 months.

In the first fiscal quarter of 2022, Chapek reported 7.2 billion dollars in revenue from Disney parks, experiences and products, boasting all-time high revenues. Rick Munarriz, a financial analyst, said that while posting that kind of profit is helpful, it's not the largest indicator of how well the company is doing overall, since Disney was the worst performing stock of the Dow 30 in 2021.

Mostly due to the fact that Disney Plus, under Chapek's guidance, isn't set to turn a profit until at least 2024 at best, which means he needs to squeeze every penny out of every other part of the company that he can in the meantime, so that he doesn't look even worse to stockholders.

But the cuts and what some fans perceive as unabashedly putting profits over people has led to discontentment among fans, reaching such a fever pitch that it's extending far beyond the echo chamber of Disney blogs.

[Quote shown on screen as James reads it.]

"When you spend the most amount of money you've ever spent and you go and you have a substandard experience worse than before - and this is multiplied by the fact that it's so crowded - these are all things that kind of entice this... extreme dissatisfaction,"

Theme park expert Scott Smith told the Washington Post earlier this year. Isn't it wild that theme park expert is a job?

Chapek, though, is in a unique position as far as CEOs of multi-billion dollar corporations go. Disney is first and foremost in the business of making money, but unlike almost every other giant corporation, it doesn't want to be seen that way by the general public. People feel as though they have a personal investment in Disney because Disney markets itself as having a personal investment in the happiness of its fans.

By creating the idea that Disney is a safe place for people, a place where they will feel loved and supported the same way that they do (or want to) in their own homes, they create a higher standard of relationship between the company and its customers. That's why Disney doesn't use that term at all. Rather, customers are "guests" always. But it's also why, because Chapek has been so transparent in his monetary motivations and so apparently blind to guests' unhappiness, so many of the people who have bought into this idea feel like he's letting them down. And because fans of the company are losing faith, so are many who work for the House of Mouse.

It's an odd situation for the company to be in. Over the last three decades, Disney has only had two CEOs, one of whom oversaw the Disney Animation Renaissance, and the other oversaw Disney becoming the biggest media company in the world. Enough goodwill among fans was built up over those last three decades that many people defaulted to, "let Disney have it, they'll do it right," any time a particular franchise was floundering. And now people are looking at Disney with derision.

So what does all this have to do with The Owl House? Well, I just wanted to point out how big of a tool Bob Chapek is. His reluctance to come out against the "don't say gay" bill really rubbed me the wrong way. But the real reason I'm talking about him is timing. You see, The Owl House first started airing in January of 2020 and was renewed for a second season before the first episode even aired. That's how much faith Disney had in the show. And it was well founded faith, with the show receiving widespread critical acclaim, multiple awards, and shockingly solid ratings with a Saturday morning cartoon, especially in the age of just sitting your kid down in front of Netflix and letting their brains melt.

The second season premiered in June of 2021, but in May of 2021, a month earlier, Disney announced the cancellation of the show, giving it three 42-minute long episodes to wrap everything up instead of a proper full third season. What was the big difference at Disney between January of 2020 and May of 2021? Well, the CEO went from being a guy who argued for gay marriage legalization, even threatening to stop donations to the Obama re-election campaign in 2012 if the president didn't come out in favor of it, to a guy who kept silent when the Florida government started passing legislation that erased queer people from classrooms. That's quite a drastic shift!

And where Season One saw Luz and Amity have an obvious crush on each other, Season Two went right ahead and made them a couple, introduced a nonbinary former and likely current love interest for Eda, and introduce Hunter who many believe is being set up for a gay pairing with Gus. Which is a little problematic, given the four year age gap? But Hunter's a little bit... emotionally stunted from his lifelong tenure in the magical Hitler Youth boot camp, and Gus only ever associates with older kids, so let's just say they're really good friends, and maybe even roommates someday.

The further queering of the show in Season Two probably didn't sit well with a CEO who openly cares more about profit than people and sees queer characters as tokens to never be confirmed, and only really exist when the golden goose known as Kevin Feige says so. So before Season Two even got off the ground he clipped its wings. I know it hasn't been confirmed that he was the one who made the final decision, but it reeks of him, so he's getting the blame. And Season Two is even better than Season One, with even more critical praise and an increase in the ratings as teenagers and even adults started to find the show and fall in love with its characters. But that didn't matter, because it was already canceled, dead witch walking. Because it didn't "fit the brand." Well, what the hell is the Disney brand anyway?

Time for me to use that marketing degree. Simply put, a brand is a promise to your customer. When describing a brand, it's tempting to simply list the attributes of a business, describe the product line or point to the logo and tagline. But a brand is more than that. It's a unique benefit for your customers. The Walt Disney Company presents itself is more than just a business. It is an authentic American icon. An honest-to-goodness rags-to-riches story of one man who struck out and made it big - and did everything he could to crush unions along the way. But the Walt Disney Company's promise has always been to be bringers of joy. As Walt said,

[Quote shown on screen as James reads it.]

"We need to create joy not for children... But for the children in each of us."

The brand identity of any brand consists of the way the company identifies itself through the products or services sold and the image it presents. In the case of Disney, the company is named after Walt Disney's proper name. He even inspired the logo of the company through his handwritten signature, which is part of the brand identity of Disney to this day. There are entire font families based on Walt's handwriting.

This direct connection to its founder is also a part of the Disney brand, as the Walt Disney company is one of the very few corporations in the world with a founder mythology. Now, Disney is unique for a lot of reasons, but this one is kind of bonkers. Disney has fostered a clear sense of identity built just as much around Walt Disney himself, as it is the media it produces. Other corporations and even studios tend to lean away from using their own founders as a mascot for various reasons. A person is singular, and a person can be fallible, but more importantly, a person is boring. "Who stands for this company? Just a dude? Okay..." People pack bond easier with a mascot, like Tony the Tiger. Walt Disney perpetuated a sense of personality to the company. It's easy to strip the fursuit mascot away and realize that it's just a sad old capitalist man working for Kellogg's, but with Disney you push the cardboard cutout of Mickey Mouse down, and there's kindly Mr. Disney! It's an extra layer of deception that Walt fostered in his own lifetime.

We don't think about the founders of corporations. Look at 20th Century Fox! Before the merger, Fox Studios was founded by William Fox. Both the "G" and "M" of MGM were named for Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer. Disney not only wants Walt Disney to remain relevant in a modern discussion of media, but almost venerates this man in a way few corporations do of their founders. The only companies I can think of with a founder mythology are like, Apple? But Steve Jobs notoriously gave zero f words about how other people perceived him. Very early on, Walt Disney established the production company as a family brand. Family owned, family operated, family safe. A movie studio that would produce films the whole family could enjoy, from the youngest children to the oldest grandparents, enchanting young kids and bringing adults back to their childhoods. He's quoted as saying:

[Quote shown on screen as James reads it.]

"You're dead if you aim only for the kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway."

One could also say adults are just kids with bank accounts. Disney offers multiple promises to these families. A Disney resort promises that you will enjoy your time. It's one of the most important promises of its company. A Disney film promises to be enjoyable by the whole family, without excluding anyone with content wholly too mature for kids or too juvenile for adults. The Disney experience promises to be available to everyone, no matter how rich or poor. If you can't afford to take your kids to the parks, there's always the movies. And the Disney company promises not to break these aforementioned promises, and in doing so will allow you to build memories to last a lifetime. Those are the promises that the Disney corporation has been making to customers since the 1930s. In the year 2000, an extra promise was added. Disney promised to tell stories for every child, no matter where they're from, what they believe, or what color their skin is. Enter the Disney Princesses becoming the most diverse bunch of skinny girls on a toy shelf. But when you ask a Disney executive what their brand is, they will simply say: stories. Old stories, new stories, fairy tales, myths, legends, parables and epics. Stories for the whole family. Stories that exemplify what is right and just.

Whether Disney ever actually was as all-inclusive and family-friendly as they'd like to pretend is up for debate. The whiteness of the company's movies didn't start to change until the 1990s at which point the female characters of color were universally fetishized. Jasmine, Pocahontas, Esmeralda, all women of color, all far less clothed than Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Belle or Cinderella. So if Disney's brand is family friendly animated entertainment as well as inclusivity, I would imagine that The Owl House would fit their brand perfectly. It's got magic, fun characters, appeals to kids and adults, and is toyetic as all hell. And yet, it didn't fit the brand. Has their brand changed, or is it that the inclusivity part of their brand was never meant to include girls who kiss girls, or boys who kiss boys, or people who don't identify as either.

Let's say for a moment that Disney actually does love their queer fans and The Owl House really did just not fit the Disney brand because it has changed. Well, what the hell is the Disney brand.... today?

There's little you can do or say to convince me that there was a rational reason for The Owl House's cancellation. Good ratings, good reviews are one thing, but the fact that the show attracted an older audience is another thing entirely, and a citation for the program's cancellation was the older demographic it was attracting. The mindset is that if the wrong age bracket was tuning into the show, product lines directed at six to eleven year olds would be less inclined to buy ad space. But there's nothing saying that Disney couldn't adapt and put the show at a later time slot for more appropriate consumer demographics.

There's also nothing saying that the executives wouldn't be aware that Disney Plus was in late stage development and realized that adult audience cartoons tend to do well on streaming services. There's simply no reason why you don't want an incredibly toyetic show directed at an adult audience who have an abundance of expendable income. There is, after all, a subindustry at Disney geared at marketing their princesses for themed weddings and... funerals. Yes, funerals. Times like this make it seem like the executive thought process at Disney is powered by a single gerbil on a wheel.

But even in a quote-unquote bad time slot, The Owl House got decent ratings as it was. And in the end, the rationale given to Terrace was that her show didn't fit the Disney brand, which at first seems self-apparent enough that it almost makes sense, and then you think about it for more than two seconds and it's like, what brand?

Because it's true! There was a very carefully crafted media environment that was meticulously kept by Walt Disney, but that brand also carried on after Walt passed away. Even when the company was nothing but the Disney Vault and straight-to-video flops and cheap sequels. But today, does it still carry as much weight? Now that Disney has as many IPs under its belt as it does, can we say that everything fits into the brand? Does it expand the brand? In which world does the Disney brand include a "they all die at the end movie" like Rogue One, allusions to alcoholism in Iron Man 2, or in Doctor Strange 2 with Marvel's favorite mom-gone-slasher monster. Not to mention the wanton violence across either franchise, and the way that either franchise struggles to fit into the Disney brand when they try to force it - referencing The Book of Boba Fett and the titular character's newfound "no killing" rule.

And even today, Disney has left their princess brand by the wayside for some time. The Princess and the Frog faced upfront criticism over representation and stunt voice casting, and took some time to find a fanbase. Tangled struggled to find an audience, and while Frozen did have a massive upfront success, it did so while distancing itself from the typical princess formats to be a movie about two estranged sisters healing a bond. But to make these kinds of features with these kinds of messages, ones which can appeal to older audiences as well as the targeted younger ones, the studio has to be willing to let narratives dive into conflicts which are not strictly in line with the media environment that Walt would have approved of. And while the company is still married to its archaic image, in order to keep up with the modern mediascape, there are a handful of aforementioned instances where certain medias rest uncomfortably outside the strict parameters. However, as Disney adds so many exceptions to the Disney guidelines, is the brand itself becoming too vague? The more Disney expands, alters, and permits free radicals to perpetuate the modern Disney culture, the more holes get poked into the brand itself. What exactly is the Disney brand today?

I see the collapse of the Disney brand beginning with The Pirates of the Caribbean. Yes, it was inspired by a ride at Disney World - Disneyland? - the one in Florida. However the film let itself go into uncharted waters. Michael Eisner, then CEO, was sure that the film would be a disaster. The film had violence, alcoholism, and a no small amount of horror. The stakes were real, and there was a palpable threat to the main cast. For the first time, Disney produced a non-animated feature that was able to reach cultural permeance. And it worked, with the Pirates franchise bringing in over 4.5 billion dollars. And if it worked once, it would work again.

I can argue that Disney had two brands: their established brand, and a developing brand for their live action stuff, one which would draw in an older audience who may scoff at new Disney properties. One that was more adventurous, daring, and not quite so safe. And ever since then Disney has been moving its animated and live-action media to more overlapping spaces, to the point where I suppose we can say that the Disney brand exists in the same way that the British Empire exists. It's more of a concept that still occupies a couple of its territories, but when referring to the British Empire, we reference the thing that it was at its peak.

So when Bob Chapek says that The Owl House doesn't have a place on the network because of the Disney brand is he referring to the Disney brand of old or the Disney brand of today? If the Disney brand is the scapegoat for why The Owl House got thrown under the bus, then I think it's interesting to examine what about The Owl House is so incompatible. Because The Owl House honestly feels more like classic Disney than a lot of the other content that's going up. The only thing that is particularly outstanding in this regard is the comfort the show has in depicting various gender expressions and identities - namely the gay stuff. The series did take its time to build up the in-your-face queerness, strategically waiting until viewers were too invested to really hold it against the show, and given the strong ratings through the second season when the queer stuff really began to appear, it's clear that most audiences weren't uncomfortable with it either.

Regardless of whether the final decision came from Bob Chapek or not, his job is to make the company money and shepherd the Disney brand. It's hard to cancel something that's getting good ratings, but if you wanted it gone, he could simply cite the Disney brand as an excuse. The problem, as just demonstrated, the Disney brand is so threadbare these days that it exists more in concept than in practice. And if the brand is so tyrannical that it's costing the company a franchise that earned one of the highest accolades for writing excellence while at the same time developing an ever-growing dedicated fanbase, maybe the brand isn't good for business.

The only tangible excuse at the end of the day is bigotry. And if Chapek is letting bigotry lead his decision making for the company, even if he is using the "brand" as a scapegoat, he's just bad at business. Especially after the Florida controversy over the "don't say gay" bill, Disney lost whatever queer credibility it had left. Queer audiences were some of the most dedicated Disney fans in the world, but with the company's reluctance to recognize queer characters in their media bleeding over into real life, we saw the consequences of queer erasure spilling out into actual legislation. If there was any time for Disney to put up or shut up, it was then. During that one week period when these laws were the make-or-break point of being passed in the southern states, where Disney conducts enough of its business to sway the politicians they endorse, even leaks at Disney said the word was to remain radio silent. Nothing was being planned or prepared, according to rumor, by mandate from Chapek himself. And when a statement was released, it was just the normal par-for-the-course statement you'd expect.

And meanwhile, while this was going on Disney apparently was developing a movie to be released later this year: Strange World. Which itself has an ensemble cast, though the central character... is a gay teenager! While on the surface we might say, "oh finally!", after everything I am considerably more cynical about Disney and their alleged gay representation, and this prompted me to consider how Disney could manifest a good relationship with queer representation. Okay, so Disney's put money behind the film to push it through production. Given the timing and how long animated films take to make, this was likely a film approved by Bob Iger. It seems funny to me that not a single soul outside of Disney caught wind that this project was happening until six months from release. When it comes to nearly any other Disney feature, the press starts talking about them years in advance. Disney has even announced a movie so far ahead that they even end up being canceled in development. Remember Gigantic? It was announced in 2015 for a 2019 release, but was cancelled in 2017.

So Disney making Strange World alone isn't going to do anything to sway my opinion. Disney will need to release the movie in a way that matches how they would build up hype for Frozen or a live-action remake. I have to see that the studio wants people to see this movie, that the executives are willing to stand behind it and prop it up with other movies that they're so proud of. Unlike The Owl House, which Disney not only did nothing to promote but has not produced nor licensed a single piece of tie-in merchandise. Where's my plush King, damnit? What about Hooty? Owl House LEGO sets! Probably better to support Etsy creators anyway.

But if Disney releases Strange World quietly without any marketing budget, hoping that it will be entirely forgotten, that will send a clear message that the company has no ongoing interest in promoting queer stories. That they are ashamed of queer stories and that they see no value in queer stories. The queerness is something Disney doesn't even want to associate with, but is only willing to interact with insofar as it gets the angry monkey off their back. But what will happen, regardless, is the gay media hailing Disney for giving it to us. Even if Disney corporate acts like it would rather Strange World never existed. And while Disney cut the check and threw it out there, they're doing nothing to ensure people either know about it or watch it. Disney's not actually giving us anything, they're dropping it and then will blame us for not making it successful. And then using that lack of success to justify queer identities as box office poison.

It was always Dana Terrace that gave us The Owl House. I'm not willing to give Disney the credit when it was made abundantly clear that the Mouse didn't want anything to do with it.

If you don't mind me being really cynical for a minute, what does it really mean for a show like The Owl House to get cancelled? This is a more significant blow than you would think. Because while other media may include queer characters, there can be problems with this. The more benign manifestation of visible queerness is characters whose queerness is incidental and not indicative of the plot. This is evident in media I have covered like The Old Guard, which is valid but visibility is all it accomplishes. Alternatively, you have stories where the plot is built around queerness like Heartstopper and Young Royals. Media has been built around heterosexuality since... forever. More annoyingly, you have queer characters who exist for a little more than providing a presentation about the validity of queerness itself, which is annoying because it's not straight people who need queer characters.

But The Owl House is this anomaly because while it included incidental queerness, it also had something to say about the state of queerness itself. The series used textual language to not only afford a queer audience with visibility, but used subtextual language to encode themes and statements about the queer community. I got to read messages in a piece of media that reflect my very experiences of being queer. I mentioned above that The Owl House does like to take a stance on social conformity and normative conditioning, that being, the way a society enforces specific values. These collective values and the people who embody and enforce them are what we refer to as the hegemony, for those who were curious. The hegemony exists due to social tradition that enforces certain elements of culture,and they are imparted on us from the day we are conceived. The language you speak, the fashion of the day, social trends, technology, biases and prejudices, these are all things that contribute, but even things like being wrapped in a blue or pink blanket when you're born ,being given toy trucks or dolls on your first birthday, are all things people do to push you into becoming what society expects you to be. For many people, those roles are inert and benign. Most people really don't mind going along with these social expectations, and that's perfectly fine for them! The problem becomes - and this is where the queerness and The Owl House are concerned - when social conformers punish those who do not or cannot conform to these hegemonistic values.

This is where the "just be yourself" messaging in the 90s came from in children's programming. Following the hyper-conformity of Reagan's 1980s, there was a reactive push to encourage children to manifest the person they were, rather than the person society badgered them into being. Content like this rarely goes as far as The Owl House does to outline exactly what it means to be a social outsider, beyond getting bullied by the popular kids or disappointing your parents. And The Owl House kind of gets it right. Getting bullied kind of is the surface level manifestation of being a social outsider, but - and queer people can especially relate to this - is far from the only way that society has to badger you into neat little boxes. There's a much larger systemic problem when it comes to strictly enforced social standards. From a top-down authoritarian standpoint, society is easier to control when a ruling party can limit life tracks that are available to individuals, because they in turn can control the tracks. In the Boiling Isles, there are nine paths - covens - with slight variations to accommodate subgroups. I can't really say our society has many more; if anything our society has markedly less.

But then you realize that the Boiling Isles themselves are an escape from Luz's life, where she's being forced into one of these projected paths in the human realm. It's not a stretch to say that the principal allegory of the show is Luz abandoning contemporary society in lieu of a queer society, akin to a country kid moving to the big city for college, and then learning that this magical queer world isn't quite how YA literature makes it out to be. There isn't the social scape of a bunch of disparate scrappy folks working together to facilitate community values - there's fragmentation, tribalism, internalized queerphobia and thrice as many gatekeepers as there are distinguishable identities. Luz faces the same challenges: the second she gets to magic school, she's forced into a spell track that will determine what school of magic she will study for the rest of her life. Her friend Willow already demonstrated how difficult it can be to change this track. And by the end of Season One, we discover that the fate which awaits those who do not conform is imprisonment in the Conformatorium. And that's only for witches who passively avoid the system - for witches like Eda who directly challenge the establishment, they await public shame and execution.

Luz struggles with conformity. She wants the simple things by witch standards. However, she is immediately faced with criticism simply because humans lack the anatomy to perform typical magic. And even though Luz discovers how to study magic through discovering four combinable glyphs around the isles, she is constantly decried as a fake witch. It's a struggle for her to convince classmates and grown-ups to take her seriously. Many don't believe she has a place in the Boiling Isles, the place she escaped to in order to reject conformity. And suddenly Luz is in an escapist environment which has the very trappings of the conformist society from which she fled. Welcome to the queer community! [party noisemaker sound]

Where we don't have covens, we have flags. And it's remarkable that a community that recognizes genderfluid as an identity is so inflexible about their thinking about a range of identities. These are just labels that describe who you are at a given time, they're not your destiny. Having the same label all your life is okay, but there's also no rules against taking them off and putting them on at will. People change! But because we are entering hegemonistic spaces, we need to fit into the boxes that the hegemony likes to use to classify everything that is outside the norm. It's like the only way we can get accepted is if they get to ascribe neat clinical titles to us, like biologists discovering a new species. Our acceptance seems to be conditional on classification. And as with The Owl House, if we can be classified, then an authority can control us.

And unfortunately, a prime example of this latent process of conditioning, as it affects us, is present within The Owl House. Because while there are lesbian and bisexual women depicted, and even fluent use of they/them pronouns for an incidentally nonbinary character, the limited depiction of gay men uses probably my least favorite trope: the gay dads. I'm generally bothered by the gay dads trope. A secondary character, not the main character, but a character whose parents are significant enough that they could be featured in an episode or two, will have two dads for parents. In this case, Luz's best friend Willow. Which in itself is not a bad thing - some people have gay dads. Some people are gay dads! Gay dads have spent a lot of the last century fighting for the ability to raise children. But the problem becomes when that's all we have, as if that's the only way executives are comfortable depicting gay men at all.

I feel like Terrace herself has earned the benefit of the doubt from me, and that if there were any gay boys for Luz to be around they were cut from the show from on high, but it's still disheartening to see that Willow's fathers and the boys dancing at grom are likely all we're going to get. The series does not have much longer to wrap up a lot of loose ends and is unlikely to introduce new characters in relationship dynamics that are not already in play. Especially Gus and Hunter, while displaying strong chemistry together, might be aged too far apart to develop as anything other than good friends or brotherly.

But why is this such a bad thing? Well, media's role in enforcing conformity is to normalize various expressions. It's why representation in media is so important. The more people are confronted with identities and ideas, the more these seem normal. Normalization through repetition. This is part and partial^[sic:parcel] of why there is such an outcry for women's representation for different kinds of women and especially different kinds of bodies. More diverse representation opens up more venues of perceivably valid self-expression. It helps if this is done in tandem with real-world representation in order to establish these identities as people rather than just characters. However, it's not a stretch to go from normalization to enforcing conformative values through repetition.The more a kind of identity is depicted in the same way, the more little baby queers and others begin to internalize various expectations for what their life should look like. When children's programming is only interested in depicting gay men as married fathers of a secondary character, this establishes the expectations that the role of gay men in society is to perpetuate these traditional homemaking values, and gay men kinda get that kind of conditioning.

If this is you, then that's your truth to live, but there is a sense of badgering and shaming other gays who openly choose to leave Grindr on their phone after they graduate from college. It's the same way the closeted gays with corporate jobs in the 80s would dismiss AIDS victims as "getting what was coming to them." There is very much a drive to pressure other gay men to put on airs for the straights. You know, to justify the validity of our human rights. And like the Boiling Isles, the queer community manifests covens of our own. Here, it's okay to be different, but not too different. There, it's okay to be magic, but not too magic.

But bear in mind, the gatekeeping agenda of the Boiling Isles was not enforced by natural magic users. Emperor Belos was a human disguising himself as a witch. His control and compartmentalization of magic was always conducted with the objective of eradicating witches. Is that also a parallel for the world's queer gatekeeping? We, like the witches of the Boiling Isles, fear public scrutiny and violence against us. There, the imaginary threat of wild magic is used to justify oppression and violence, even though wild magic never seems to cause any harm to anyone. Is that really any different from recent debates about kink at pride parades? Many within the community blame regressive anti-queer legislation and book bannings on sex-positive sentiments that we display. So we attack ourselves, because some of us don't want to give straight people a reason to harm us. Regardless of the fact that many of these talking points, i.e. "I did not consent to your kink" were used verbatim against trans people in public in the 80s and earlier, and that historically speaking the hateful straights do not often need a reason to use violence against us.

Just like Belos is a human pretending to be a witch in order to hunt them, the sentiments of self-oppression and gatekeeping in the queer community are either derived from internalized phobias or reactions to violence, threats, and regressive laws. If we live in fear of the heterohegemony, then the hegemony can still control us. And instead, we develop these queer life tracks to rock the boat as little as possible in the misguided belief that it will give us more political clout to expand our rights. Because that's going swimmingly, apparently. [Text on screen: LGBTQ youth in middle or high school: 42% report seriously considering suicide.]

What comes to mind is that observing the last century, queer rights hit their greatest strides when community attitudes were more radical. Periods where we put on suits, get offices and follow the appropriate channels are when we make compromises and various letters to the acronym get left behind. When critics call us groomers for even existing, shriveling up and molding ourselves to be what they want isn't going to advance our causes. Just like Democrats cowering at Republicans threatening to stage a filibuster is-- just shows us that Democrats can be coerced. And it's hard to be taken seriously when history shows that you back down from a fight at the slightest sign of resistance.

Thinking about it, Disney could have used The Owl House to gain so much good will from the queer community. Just as J [bleep] goes off the rails and becomes a flaming bigot, here comes this new franchise filled with witches and wizards and queer acceptance and representation around every corner. It could have been a replacement for all the people who felt let down by what she'd done and said. Disney could have positioned it as the Harry Potter for all those abandoned by she-who-must-not-be-named. But they didn't. Instead they killed it. They couldn't let it die because it was thriving with a growing fanbsae, instead they killed it. They took this beautiful queer story, this house where us weirdos are accepted and embraced, and they tore it down.

And we didn't say a thing about it. The fans did, sure, but the queer community as a whole was just sort of... silent. We've been doing that a lot lately. Not just us queers, but a lot of people. When we need to be loudest, we go quiet.

We weren't always this way, you know. I mean the queer community, we used to rise up and demand our rights and protections. Look at the AIDS crisis in the 80s and 90s. Sure, there were a painful amount of gays in nice cushy jobs telling everyone to just keep quiet and wait for the CDC and FDA to do their job, to do their research, to spend a few years, maybe a decade, running tests and trials to find something that might help you not die of HIV and AIDS. "Just shut up and wait!" But too many of us didn't have the luxury of waiting. We were in crisis. We needed help now.

And so ACT UP was formed. ACT UP protested outside the New York Stock Exchange, the FDA offices, the CDC offices, inside of churches, outside of Congress, and even outside the homes of anti-gay politicians. Its members were arrested over and over again. They were demonized by straight society, lambasted by establishment gays, the people with power looked at them like buzzing flies that needed to be zapped.

But in the end, they did get more funding for AIDS research. They did get new drugs into a speedier pipeline than the decade-long wait that FDA trials could take. It was their activism, their fighting, that helped turn HIV and AIDS from a death sentence to a condition you can not only live with but live a perfectly normal life with.

That reminds me of The Owl House, to be honest. There's a lot of passive resistance to Emperor Belos in The Owl House. People inside and outside his sphere of power doing a little bit here and there to shake up his rule, but nothing too major. He's even convinced multiple witches to join his side, promising them influence and power once his plans come to fruition, just like so many queers bend the knee to establishment power in real life, for a chance to get some power of their own. But just like in real life, Belos doesn't plan on ever giving them power. Once he's finished, they'll be dead and he'll be all the more powerful for it. They're nothing but pawns in his great chess match.

When people followed the right track they set out before them, they were stabbed in the back. Just like the queer community gets stabbed in the back. Look at same-sex marriage. We did everything the right way. We took it through the courts and we won. But less than a decade later and it looks like that same court with a few different members might just reverse that decision. Even though we did as we were told and followed the rules.

At the end of Season Two, Eda and Lilith send King and Luz away on what they think will be a long wild goose chase of a quest, so long that they will be spared from what will happen when Emperor Belos's plans reach their zenith. And what will Eda and Lilith do in the meantime? Give up. What more can they do?

And I'm worried that a lot of people of my generation and those older than me are in the same mindset right now. An activist conservative Supreme Court is systemically removing rights from people all over the country, but other than some angry tweets and a couple of peaceful protests, I'm not seeing a whole lot of pushback. Are we exhausted? Have we been fighting the good fight for too long? Have we given up? Are we surrendering the battle while shielding the next generation from it so they can fight it later?

Maybe it's a rude awakening, but the next generation isn't being shielded or protected, and they know they're a part of the battle. Every person with a uterus seeing the Supreme Court deleting their bodily autonomy, every trans kid being kicked off their sports team or out of the bathroom, every gay kid being outed by homophobic teachers, and queer kids in general watching as their states again and again take away their rights. They know the battle is happening. And just like Luz and Amity and Gus and Willow and Hunter, they're not backing down from the fight. They're fighting back against the destruction of their special magical world.

Passive resistance doesn't work. It's never worked. It's always been a Band-Aid we slap onto a gaping wound to say we did our part. We say it's necessary so that the cishets will accept us into the club, that we can't kick up too much of a stink or else they'll get mad at us and not give us what we need. Why do we expect to be given anything? We should be taking what we need, not just queer people, but women and people of color and disabled people and everyone being crushed by the weight of the overpowered minority of rich white cisgender men that dictates what rights we're allowed to have. We bend to their whims and do as they say, but becoming what they want us to be doesn't advance our cause, it just advances theirs.

So I think, like King at the end of Season Two of The Owl House, maybe we need to introduce a little bit of chaos into the system. Show them that their control over us is an illusion they've tricked themselves into believing. We've been beaten down pretty hard before by politicians and plagues, but we still fought back. We still rose up and we still won. And so how pathetic are the cishet power players of the world that they couldn't beat us at our worst?

So go forth witches, topple the Emperor Beloses of the world and conformity. I know we can do it. We're kind of magical like that.